As the Mets have battled to maintain their spot atop the National League East, Francisco Lindor has led the way. After inaugurating his time in New York with a career-worst season with the bat last year, the 28-year-old shortstop has kicked off the start of his 10-year, $341 million contract with a campaign worthy of a spot in MVP discussions.

Lindor had the chance to play the hero on Tuesday night in the Bronx. For as well as Frankie Montas and Clarke Schmidt pitched in the Subway Series finale, the game could have easily swung the other direction at the end. Trailing 4-2 and down to their final out, the Mets loaded the bases against Schmidt, who had already completed three strong innings of relief. Up came Lindor, who over his previous eight games had collected 13 hits (a 263-hit pace!) but on this night had merely walked twice (on a total of 15 pitches) in four plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy has been doing lot of experimenting this season. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Drafted 25th overall last year by the Oakland Athletics out of Thousand Oaks High School in California, Muncy came into the current campaign with all of 11 professional games under his belt. At the tender age of 20 — today is his birthday — it’s understandable that he’s still trying to forge an identity at the plate.

Power could end up being his calling card. A 6-foot-1, 185-pound shortstop who projects to fill out further, Muncy has 19 home runs on the season, 16 at Low-A Stockton and three at High-A Lansing. Making contact has been an issue. Facing pitchers who are almost exclusively older than him, he has fanned 146 times in 483 plate appearances while putting up a .229/.338/.441 slash line and a 104 wRC+.

Muncy — No. 12 on our updated Athletics Top Prospects list — discussed his early career development last week.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with a question I sometimes ask young players: Give me a self-scouting report.

Max Muncy: “That’s probably different for me, just because I kind of know what’s in the making. But the power is showing up a lot this year. I think I’ll hit for average, for sure, but what I’m going through right now is a learning curve.” Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — More than three weeks after the Yankees made him their top trade deadline acquisition — and a night after the pitcher he replaced, Jordan Montgomery, spun a one-hit shutout to further an impressive opening run with the Cardinals — Frankie Montas was able to show the Bronx a representative version of his capabilities. Facing the Mets in front of a Yankee Stadium season high of 49,217 boisterous fans, the 29-year-old righty survived a rocky first inning, got strong support on both sides of the ball (save for one glitch), and moved Pete Alonso to bat-breaking frustration in what turned out to be a 4-2 Yankees win, giving the team its first series victory in August and salvaging a split of the season’s four-game Subway Series.

Montas allowed two runs in 5.2 innings, scattering six hits and a walk while striking out six — his highest total since his seven-strikeout effort at Yankee Stadium on June 28 while pitching for the A’s. His 15 called strikes was his highest total since that outing, and his 27% CSW (which included 10 swinging strikes) matched his season rate, heralding a return to form following a rough stretch of nearly eight weeks, during which shoulder inflammation, the trade, a trip to the bereavement list and poor performance limited him to a 5.90 ERA and 5.08 FIP in seven starts totaling just 29 innings.

“Packed house in the Bronx, [his] first Subway Series, he went out there and did his thing,” marveled Aaron Judge afterwards. “Working all his pitches, kind of similar to [Domingo] Germán… Backdoor cutter and backdoor slider to some of those lefties early on to kind of steal a strike, and then he got to that sinker-splitter combo. It’s pretty tough to tell the difference between both of those.”

“He showed some bulldog,” added Judge, whose fourth-inning solo homer — number 48 for the season and his second in as many nights — off Taijuan Walker kicked off the scoring. Judge also capped off a go-ahead two-run rally in the seventh by plating the Yankees’ final run via a single off Joely Rodríguez. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe this isn’t charitable, but I picture Alex Bregman as being a lot like me. See, when I play a game – whether a sport or a board game – I’m always thinking about the most efficient way to win, what game actions are the most valuable, and how I can do those things more often. The best games don’t have clear best options at all times, but there’s almost always some strategy you can lean on to get ahead, and I greatly enjoy figuring that strategy out.

Bregman treats baseball like I treat Taverns of Tiefenthal, my favorite board game. He knows what the most valuable things to do in baseball are, and he does them more frequently than everyone else. If you look at his Statcast page, you’ll come away unimpressed. Hard hit rate? He’s in the 42nd percentile across the majors, below average. Think that hard hit rate is misleading? He’s average when it comes to maximum exit velocity (53rd percentile), barrel rate (50th), and even average exit velocity (59th). He’s well below average in sprint speed. It doesn’t sound like he should be an outstanding hitter, at least by the measurables.

Early in Bregman’s career, that would have been a laughable claim. He totaled 16.2 WAR on the back of a 162 wRC+ between 2018 and ’19, staking a claim as one of the best hitters in the game. But in the next two years, both injury-shortened, he fell back to earth. His .261/.353/.431 line was good for a 115 wRC+, a far cry from his earlier form. Was he a creation of the juiced ball? Sign stealing? Did pitchers figure him out? Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, a powerhouse in the Bronx dominated the opposition to such a degree that it was on pace to challenge the single-season record for wins. But a funny thing happened on the way to the record books: the power went out, and over the course of a few weeks, the team did an about-face, suddenly turning into one of the league’s doormats. Such is the saga of the 2022 Yankees.

It was just over two months ago, on June 20, when I noted in this space that the Yankees’ 49–17 record (.742 winning percentage) was the majors’ best start since the 2001 Mariners went 52–14 on their way to 116 wins; only a half-dozen other teams, including the 1998 Yankees, had won 49 or more of their first 66 games. I additionally noted that even with a 48–48 record the rest of the way, the Yankees would finish with 97 wins. Since that point, they’ve gone just 26–31, and their pace over 162 games has dropped to 99 wins:

Those jagged little peaks reflect the fact that until Sunday’s victory against the Blue Jays and Monday’s win over the Mets, the Yankees hadn’t won two games in a row since July 29–30, and they still haven’t won a series since then, or put together a winning streak longer than three games since June 26–29. But for all of that, the team is still four wins better than last year’s squad at the same juncture (71–52).

A 99-win season would rate as impressive by just about any other standard, but with regards to these Yankees, it not only reads as a disappointment given the arc of their season, but it also highlights the vulnerabilities that may yet again prevent them from reaching the World Series for the first time since 2009. That drought is approaching their 1982–95 one and has already exceeded their ’65–75 one; for all of their wealth in terms of both money and prospects, they’ve been unable to break through. Read the rest of this entry »

We are launching a new FanGraphs mobile app, which is available for both iOS and Android devices. You may remember our previous attempt at an iOS app over a decade ago, but this is a completely new app that more closely reflects our website, built with a native mobile experience specifically for phones in mind.

The app is free to download, but similar to our website, it has ads unless you are signed in as a FanGraphs Member. Any customization features in the app will also only be available to Members.

As we launch today, the app has player pages, scores, and standings available. We plan on adding more features from the site in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Tristan Peters covered a lot of miles in the days surrounding this year’s trade deadline. A 22-year-outfielder now in the San Francisco Giants system, Peters was playing for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the High-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers, when his madcap travels began.

“I was told that I was being promoted to Double-A Biloxi,” Peters told me before a recent game in Portland, Maine. “That was on Sunday, and on Monday I drove from Appleton, Wisconsin to Jackson, Mississippi to meet the team there. I did 11 of the 14 hours that day, stayed in Memphis, Tennessee overnight, then drove the last three hours on Tuesday.”

He wasn’t in Jackson very long. Playing cards in the clubhouse prior to what would have been his Double-A debut — Peters was penciled into the starting lineup as Biloxi’s leadoff hitter — he was informed that he was being traded to the Giants.

His new organization requested that he report to their Double-A club in Richmond, Virginia, so the next morning Peters climbed into his car and made another 14-hour drive. This time, he covered the entire distance in one day. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to play a game you probably won’t win, watch a reliever you haven’t heard of pitch one inning and try to decide if they’re good. I don’t want to say it’s impossible, because that’s not quite the case, but it’s phenomenally difficult. Do they throw hard? Probably, because most relievers do now. Do they have a secondary pitch that makes hitters look like they’re playing baseball for the first time? Probably, because trying to hit a slider when you just saw a fastball is one of the hardest things to do in sports.

The eye test isn’t enough. What’s worse, the results test isn’t enough. Reliever ERAs are unreliable across whole seasons, never mind a single week or month. One seeing-eye single, or one down-the-middle cookie that gets fouled back instead of pummeled to Kalamazoo, can completely change a pitching line. Even more “stable” statistics bounce around wildly in small samples; whether a reliever has their good slider working or not might be the difference between a three-strikeout outing or a few walks and a trip to the showers.

Why the long windup about how we can’t know how good pitchers are? Well, I’m pretty sure Guardians reliever Trevor Stephan is good, whatever the sample size. I know what I just said… but, look at his pitches, will you?
Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into the year, expectations were high in Arlington. The Rangers, fresh off of a 100-loss season, went big in free agency, bringing in Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Jon Gray. They shopped in the second tier of free agents as well, signing Martín Pérez, Garrett Richards, Brad Miller, and Kole Calhoun to short-term deals. Trades brought in more starters: Mitch Garver joined the team this spring, and last year’s Joey Gallo trade netted several potential contributors in Ezequiel Duran, Josh H. Smith, and Glenn Otto.

Depending on how you weigh the contributions of those last three, that’s something like nine new players. It didn’t make the Rangers overnight playoff contenders – we gave them a 75-win projection and an 8% chance of reaching the playoffs before the season started – but it felt like the opening salvo of a new contender. Sign your free agents when you can get them, supplement them with a burgeoning farm system headlined by top prospect Josh Jung, and pretty soon, you’ve got a stew going.

A lot can change in a few months. This week, the Rangers ownership group, led by majority owner Ray Davis, delivered a clear sign that they aren’t happy with the way things are going. On Monday, they relieved manager Chris Woodward of his duties. Woodward had overseen some down years in Texas after taking over before the 2019 season. He’d shepherded this team adequately, at least as far as wins and losses go; we’re currently projecting the Rangers for 72.5 wins, basically the same as their preseason expectation, and it’s not like we were outliers in that projection; pretty much everyone around pegged them in the 70-75 win range.
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The delayed start to the 2022 season due to the lockout has had a lot of small consequences for the structure of the season, ranging from expanded rosters to my least favorite thing, the continued use of zombie runners in extra innings. The last (we hope) of these changes is a slight alteration to the playoff schedule, which the league sees as a necessity in order to keep the postseason from straying too far into November. On Monday, MLB announced that the three-game Wild Card Series will be played without any off-days, while an off-day will be trimmed from the Divisional Series (between Games 4 and 5); teams in the ALDS get one additional off-day, without travel, between Games 1 and 2. The Championship Series will lose an off-day between Games 5 and 6). The World Series is business as usual.

While I expected this configuration for the Wild Card round (it was already accounted for in the generalized ZiPS projections for postseason performance), there are some slight tweaks that need to be made to account for the changes to the Division and Championship Series with respect to pitching. When projecting the roster strength of a team for the purposes of postseason probabilities, ZiPS weighs pitchers at the top of the rotation more heavily. That’s because historically they have gotten a larger percentage of starter innings in the playoffs than during the regular season. But losing an extra day of rest could result in teams using the pitchers after their No. 3 starters more heavily, as well as more dilemmas involving bringing back a top starter on three days rest. There are also possible consequences for the bullpens. In other words, teams will need to be slightly deeper than normal this playoff season.

So, how do we account for that? To get a rough estimate — I’m not sure there’s a methodology that will let us do any better than that — of the potential effects of the compressed schedule, I went back into the ZiPS game-by-game postseason simulations and put together a new, quick simulation for starting pitcher usage. I used projections as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »